Tag Archives: as3

ActionScript3, Adobe, Facebook, Flash, Games, General, HTML5, Starling

Adobe Playpanel shows the best in online gaming

February 13, 2014 Mariam Dholkawala Leave a comment

Playpanel from Adobe is a desktop application that automatically bookmarks all the Flash games played in your browser. It is a perfect tool for online and social game players because it helps to discover new games and also see what others are playing.

What’s convenient about the app is that it silently runs in the background capturing your gaming behaviour without you having to manually do anything. The app captures information such as the games you’ve played, the game links, publisher information, the date you last played the games, number of times you played them etc.

The app is also browser independant, so you could be playing a game in any browser and it will automatically make it available in your Playpanel game list. I tried it with Google Chrome, Firefox and IE and it worked fine.

Playpanel requires you to login with either your Facebook login or Adobe login. I think this login compulsion could have been avoided because not everyone is comfortable inputting their login details. But then looking at it from a product perspective, it also needs to reach out to a wide audience through Facebook invites and virality through game sharing, so it can’t be avoided.

The feature I like most is the discovery of new games from the “Discover Games” tab. This list contains high quality games from well-known publishers. The games are divided into Featured games and Popular games. The featured games are hand picked by the game editors while the Popular games are chosen based on their ratings by other players. You too can rate/comment on these games or see what others have commented about it before you start playing it.

A feature called “Pinning” games helps to pin games which are then made available to your Facebook friends. You can also see what games your friends have pinned, thus collaborating with them on a multiplayer or social game mission.

It almost feels like Playpanel is like a mobile app store, the only difference being, the games are free and played in a desktop browser. Also, with so much gaming content out there it is almost impossible to know what to play or not to play. An app like Playpanel just makes it easier to identify good content.

However, it’ll be interesting to know how much further this product will evolve. One feature that I can think of is arranging games according to genres. Another is showing “similar games” thumbnails on a particular game details page. Also, it will be nice to have the game details page show whether the game is cross-platform.

With Adobe focusing heaviliy on HTML5, will it also serve as a future platform for those games? Just a food for thought!

Mariam

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Android, Book Review, Box2D, Devices, Facebook, Flash, Flash Platform, Games, General, iOS, Mobile, Starling

Box2D for Flash Games – Book Review

January 28, 2013 Mariam Dholkawala Leave a comment

Box2D is a highly popular physics engine. Its popularity lies not only in it being a free open source engine, but also because it has many features to produce realistic physics effects in games. It has also been used by many popular games across the mobile and web.

Flash is one of the supported platforms, therefore this port of Box2D has become almost a priority for many game developers wanting to use realistic physics with AS3. The book “Box2D for Flash Games” written by Emanuele Feronato is therefore a great resource for understanding of the Box2D physics concepts and getting your hands dirty with actual game development.

The book dive starts with basic examples without going too deep into the engine theory. Every new line of code added to the examples thereafter is further explained in detail. Concepts such as friction, density, primitive and complex body types, shapes and collisons are all covered . The chapters then take a step by step approach towards developing actual game levels from popular games such as Totem Destroyer and Angry Birds.

I personally follow Emanuele Feronato blog and know that he comes with tremendous experience in gaming. He contributes to the community with his gaming articles and this book only lets him share more refined and in depth information with his readers.

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Games

Working with Debug Mode in Starling with Box2D – AS3

November 4, 2012 Mariam Dholkawala 5 Comments

I recently started work on a Box2D game project using Starling, and one of my concerns was getting the debug mode to display correctly.

Box2D is a very popular physics engine. It has a debug mode which draws shape outlines, defines center of mass and shows joint connectivity, all very useful while debugging shapes behavior in a physics world. Debug mode is also very useful during prototyping when artistic graphics are not ready. Box2D has its own API but still uses native Flash objects and events.

Starling on the other hand is a game framework developed on top of the Stage3D APIs which helps write fast GPU accelerated games without having to access the Stage3D APIs. The Starling API is very similar to native Flash AS3.

Once a Starling stage instance is created, all display objects subsequently become part of this core Starling instance.
Since Box2D uses native Flash Sprite, the best way to work with Starling is to add a native Flash sprite on top of the Starling stage instance. I’ve given a quick example of how this will work in the example below –

The PlayGame Class is where the Starling framework is initialized. Within the PlayGame class, the Box2D debug sprite instance is defined. The Box2D debug Sprite instance is a native Flash and not a Starling class.

package{

    import flash.display.Sprite;
    import flash.display.StageAlign;
    import flash.display.StageScaleMode;
    import flash.events.Event;

    import starling.core.Starling;

    public class PlayGame extends Sprite{

        private var myStarling:Starling;
        public static var debugSprite:Sprite;

        public function PlayGame(){
            super();

            stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;
            stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;

            Starling.multitouchEnabled = true;
            myStarling = new Starling(MainGame, stage);
            myStarling.antiAliasing = 1;
            myStarling.start();

            stage.stage3Ds[0].addEventListener(Event.CONTEXT3D_CREATE, onContextCreated);
        }

        private function onContextCreated(e:Event):void{
            //debug mode
            debugSprite=new Sprite();
            addChild(debugSprite);
        }
    }
}

package{

import flash.display.Sprite;

import flash.display.StageAlign;

import flash.display.StageScaleMode;

import flash.events.Event;

import starling.core.Starling;

public class PlayGame extends Sprite{

private var myStarling:Starling;

public static var debugSprite:Sprite;

public function PlayGame(){

super();

stage.align = StageAlign.TOP_LEFT;

stage.scaleMode = StageScaleMode.NO_SCALE;

Starling.multitouchEnabled = true;

myStarling = new Starling(MainGame, stage);

myStarling.antiAliasing = 1;

myStarling.start();

stage.stage3Ds[0].addEventListener(Event.CONTEXT3D_CREATE, onContextCreated);

}

private function onContextCreated(e:Event):void{

//debug mode

debugSprite=new Sprite();

addChild(debugSprite);

}

The Box2D class

package{
    import starling.display.Sprite;
    import starling.events.Event;

    import Box2D.Dynamics.b2DebugDraw;
    import Box2D.Common.Math.b2Vec2;
    import Box2D.Dynamics.b2World;

    public class BoxWorld extends Sprite{
        private var world:b2World;
        private var worldScale:int = 30;

        public function BoxWorld() {
            addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStage);
        }

        private function onAddedToStage (e:Event):void {

             this.removeEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStage);
             //create Box2d world
             world = new b2World(new b2Vec2(0, 10), false);

             //set debug mode
            debugDraw(PlayGame.debugSprite);
        }

        private function debugDraw(debugSprite:flash.display.Sprite):void{
            var debugDraw:b2DebugDraw = new b2DebugDraw();
            debugDraw.SetSprite(debugSprite);
            debugDraw.SetDrawScale(worldScale);
            debugDraw.SetFlags(b2DebugDraw.e_shapeBit | b2DebugDraw.e_jointBit);
            debugDraw.SetFillAlpha(0.5);
            world.SetDebugDraw(debugDraw);
        }
    }
}

package{

import starling.display.Sprite;

import starling.events.Event;

import Box2D.Dynamics.b2DebugDraw;

import Box2D.Common.Math.b2Vec2;

import Box2D.Dynamics.b2World;

public class BoxWorld extends Sprite{

private var world:b2World;

private var worldScale:int = 30;

public function BoxWorld() {

addEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStage);

}

private function onAddedToStage (e:Event):void {

this.removeEventListener(Event.ADDED_TO_STAGE, onAddedToStage);

//create Box2d world

world = new b2World(new b2Vec2(0, 10), false);

//set debug mode

debugDraw(PlayGame.debugSprite);

}

private function debugDraw(debugSprite:flash.display.Sprite):void{

var debugDraw:b2DebugDraw = new b2DebugDraw();

debugDraw.SetSprite(debugSprite);

debugDraw.SetDrawScale(worldScale);

debugDraw.SetFlags(b2DebugDraw.e_shapeBit | b2DebugDraw.e_jointBit);

debugDraw.SetFillAlpha(0.5);

world.SetDebugDraw(debugDraw);

}

ActionScript3, Adobe, Apple, iOS

Adobe ships Flash Player 11.4 and AIR 3.4

August 21, 2012 Mariam Dholkawala Leave a comment

Adobe has released the new version of the Flash Player 11.4 and Adobe AIR 3.4. The runtimes have a list of new features, enhancements and bug fixes. Adobe has also upgraded the technology behind the AS3 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform (ASDoc).

The updates to the runtimes are very critical, especially for mobile development. I had filed a bug about using the Adobe Native Extension (ANE) with Adobe AIR 3.3 on iOS some weeks back. Hoping the new release would be easier to work with ANE.

Flash Player and Adobe AIR Feature List

ActionScript 3.0 Reference for the Adobe Flash Platform

Mariam

ActionScript3, Adobe, AIR on Android, Articles and Guidelines, Facebook, Flash, Flash Platform, General, HTML5

Flash Facebook Cookbook Review

October 12, 2011 Mariam Dholkawala 1 Comment

Facebook IS building the social web! It has more than 800 million active users and connects more than 500 million users monthly on its Facebook Platform through devices, apps and websites (source Facebook Statistics).

With such a huge demand for content on the Facebook Platform, the requirement for developers has also grown, thus leading to more learning material being available; material especially related to tips, best practices and simple guides to help one progress with the platform.

One of the newest resources for Facebook Developers is – the Flash Facebook Cookbook by James Ford. I received a copy of this book and decided to write a short review for it while reading it.

The Flash Facebook Cookbook contains around 60+ recipes for integrating Flash applications with the Graph API and Facebook. The recipes are simple and start with the basic explanation of Facebook and Flash integration. It graduates to moderate and complex examples such as News Feeds, working with the photo albums, uploading pictures, working with events and integrating HTML5 geolocation capabilities etc.

The book does not expect the developer to know the Facebook platform, but does expect some knowledge of working with Flash Builder and the Flex framework. It uses the Facebook Actionscript 3 SDK available from Github. Apparently this version is supposed to be more community driven than the official Facebook Actionscript SDK supported by Adobe and Facebook on the Google Code repository. I’ve always worked with the official version of the SDK, so I didn’t try using the Github version with the receipes.

I think it is fair to say that the book is a good resource for Facebook development on the Flash platform for the web and desktop. It does not cover the mobile platform, although a refined developer will be able to adapt the knowledge gained from this book to multiple Flash supported platforms.

Mariam

Games, Devices, Technology